MINNEAPOLIS – They were exhausted, both of them, but what coach isn’t tired all the time once the season starts? This was early last year, right at the start of practice, and one morning Tom Crean, the head coach at Marquette, and Trey Schwab, one of his assistants, showed up for work feeling like anvils had been dropped on their heads.

“People get sick,” Schwab said. “And then they get better. Same story you hear every day, everywhere in the world. We were given antibiotics, told to get some rest, then went back and kept working 50- and 60-hour weeks. It’s what coaches do.”

The antibiotics worked for Crean, who this afternoon will try to lead the Golden Eagles to the school’s third Final Four, and first since 1977. But Schwab couldn’t shake his malaise, kept feeling worse, started having difficulty breathing, started coughing up blood. He went for tests. He had a biopsy. And received staggering news.

He was suffering from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative disease that attacks the lungs’ air sacs and destroys the body’s ability to produce oxygen. It is extremely rare, and always fatal. Trey Schwab was told he wouldn’t live three years without a lung transplant, went on two lists, one nationwide, one contained to Wisconsin. There were hundreds of names ahead of his.

Last Monday, 17 months after his first diagnosis, three days before Marquette would defeat Pittsburgh in the Midwest Region semifinal, he learned he’d moved up to No. 1 on the list at Wisconsin University Medical Center. He accepted this news with a joy decidedly mixed with melancholy.

“You get to No. 1 on that list because other people get the lungs they need,” he said, “but also because other people die before they ever can.”

So Schwab waits. He keeps his mind busy. He tries to lose himself in work, as much as he can manage. Schwab used to spend 28 days a month on the road as a college scout for the Timberwolves, and when he joined Crean’s staff as a “special assistant” he routinely worked 15-hour days working the phones with recruits, breaking down film, drilling Marquette players.

Now, he does what he can, followed everywhere by an oxygen tank, attached to a plastic tube that feeds air into his nostrils. He carries a cell phone that will ring the moment a lung matching his body size and blood type – A-positive, found in only 18 percent of the population – becomes available in Madison. From the moment the phone rings, he will have a window of four to six hours to reach the operating table; if it should happen today, a Marquette booster has already offered his private plane to shuttle him back.

“He’s an inspiration to all of us,” said Dwyane Wade, Marquette’s best player. “Not only because of what he’s gone through, but because of what he does every day. He still coaches us with every bit of energy he has, and you know there have to be a million things going through his head every second. He’s amazing.”

Schwab doesn’t want to just be an emotional rallying point for his players. He wants to be there for them as a coach, not a crusade.

“As a coach, you wait your whole life for a season like this, and a team like this,” he says. “You want to be a part of every bit of it. Right to the end.”